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 Friday, January 18, 2002
know how to blog: great idea -- a blog about how people are using the opportunities opened by blogging (and Radio). I know it's been done, but I'd like to see more comments about why people are doing this -- other than the reasons given by Dave Winer and the Userland gang. The reasons they give -- democratizing the web, making the web a two-way conversation instead of a passive medium, etc. -- are all great, and maybe that's really why people are spending the massive amounts of time it can take to construct and maintain the many useful and high-quality blogs out there, but still... I can't stop thinking that there's a certain amount of exhibitionism at the heart of blogging. I also note that there seem to be an abundance of men writing these things, which leads me to suspect this is something of a masculine thing as well. I might just be projecting my own doubts here. I can think of a few theoretically good reasons why I'm spending time on this, but they're mostly too abstract for me to believe it's anything more than just a form of egotism (and, right now, procrastination). 9:33:42 PM 
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Dissimulating about the size (and role) of government. The whole Enron thing got me thinking: Forever the accounting people (like Arthur Anderson) and the megacorps (like Enron -- once the 7th largest in the U.S.) have been fighting regulations and saying that if the gov't would just leave them alone, they could find the "best" way to do business. This has a lot to do with Adam Smith and the myth of the "invisible hand," which is really another term for greed. "Dissimulating" is a bit about what happens when this kind of thinking gets rolled into the rhetoric of "big government." We should all think long and hard about Enron (and specifically, how the rich got richer, the poor (or at least the not-rich people who were depending on Enron's retirement plan) got the shaft) next time there's any sort of public debate about regulations designed to limit the "freedom" of markets and corporations. 8:29:56 PM
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A System Corrupted. The Enron debacle is not just the story of a company that failed; it is the story of a system that failed. -- Yeah, and that "system" is not regulatory, it's more basic than that. Krugman concludes that "The truth is that key institutions that underpin our economic system have been corrupted. The only question that remains is how far and how high the corruption extends." Where he's wrong is that there should still be any question about how far the corruption extends; it's ingrained in the profit-motive that undergirds our entire economy and political system. No amount of regulation is going to get rid of that. [The New York Times: Opinion] 4:03:35 PM
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Jonathan Franzen (author of The Corrections continues to generate literary buzz. Is that sexy man really who he says he is, or was he using a stunt double for his book jacket photo? Did he snub Oprah, or did she snub him? Via wallace-l. 1:46:00 PM
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iPod could have been priced $50 higher?. I don't think so. Ok, if you're a complete latest-and-greatest addict, or just obsessive about music in your pocket, you might have been willing to pay $1000. But for most of us who live in reality and work for a living, there are so many options with pretty good feature sets for much lower prices, that the iPod just doesn't make sense. My girlfriend gave me a RioVolt, and I couldnt' be happier: 150-200 mp3s fit easily on a cd, and that's more than I can usually listen to in whatever amount of time I'm away from my computer or stereo. It doesn't fit in my pocket, but almost. (Fine, I still drool over that tiny white wonder. And soon it will come in even more appetizing 9:33:20 AM
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Top 10 hits for conspiracy on..
 | 5/7/02; 7:38:05 PM. |
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